


We Solemnly Swear

by sparebitofparchment



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Angst, Anxiety, Eventual Romance, F/F, Female Marauders (Harry Potter), First War with Voldemort, Found Family, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Gay Panic, Gen, Hogwarts Sixth Year, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, MWPP, Marauders Era (Harry Potter), Marauders Friendship (Harry Potter), Minor Character Death, Mostly Gen, Multi-POV, Mutual Pining, Not Canon Compliant, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Slow Burn, Slow Romance, and about seizing joy despite everything being terrible, but mostly it's a wolfstar slowburn, for no particular reason... no particular reason at all, this is absolutely a mapmaking fic, wolfstar
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-31
Updated: 2020-10-01
Packaged: 2021-03-06 18:55:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 15,990
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26203795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sparebitofparchment/pseuds/sparebitofparchment
Summary: AU where the Marauders are BAMF ladies and You-Know-Who is taking over a little faster than he does in canon.***The Marauders—newly animagi—are entering their sixth year at Hogwarts. Jo Potter’s father is campaigning to be Minister for Magic; Remy Lupin is struggling to balance her prefect duties with her monthly monster situation; Pippa Pettigrew is sick of being the odd one out; and Saoirse Black is thoroughly not having a good time. The Black family has begun entangling themselves openly with the Dark Lord’s interests, and as Saoirse begins to extricate herself from them after a hard summer at home, her troubles follow her to school.*****on hiatus for a bit**
Relationships: Female James Potter/Lily Evans Potter, Female Regulus Black & Female Sirius Black, Female Sirius Black & Female Remus Lupin & Female Peter Pettigrew & Female James Potter, Female Sirius Black/Female Remus Lupin - Relationship, James Potter/Lily Evans Potter, Regulus Black & Sirius Black, Sirius Black & Remus Lupin & Peter Pettigrew & James Potter, Sirius Black/Remus Lupin
Comments: 15
Kudos: 13





	1. Don't Look at the Dragon

**Author's Note:**

> Characters:
> 
> Jo Potter = James Potter  
> Saoirse (seer-sha) Black = Sirius Black  
> Remy Lupin = Remus Lupin  
> Pippa Pettigrew = Peter Pettigrew  
> ____
> 
> This fic condemns rowling's transphobic views.

“Write me—Marlene, really! I haven’t got time now! Write me a note! I’ll look on the train. Pete, you can’t ask me what time tryouts are before term starts; you know I barely think about those things until they’re upon me.”

Jo Potter’s laughter preceded her down the corridor as the Hogwarts Express inched out of King’s Cross. Saoirse Black turned expectantly just as her best friend burst into the compartment, arms flung wide. Jo’s dark hair swung in a sleek, high ponytail and her thin, angled face was bold with laughter as she shoved her glasses back up her nose.

“My Marauders, at last,” she said, with terrible fondness.

“Jo Potter, Quidditch hero!” cried Pippa Pettigrew in return, flinging an arm wide to match and promptly dropping her trunk on her toes for the second time in as many minutes.

“Ah, Pip, don’t lay it on so thick, you’ll Engorge her already expansive ego.” Saoirse draped herself fully across one of the benches, a tragedy of black school robes and untamed, blacker hair, and though she indulged herself in an expansive groan as she said this, she was grinning wider than she had in months.

Jo just laughed and bewitched Pippa’s trunk into the overhead racks along with her own, which was plastered almost completely in a moving collage of Puddlemere United posters applied with Sticking Charms. Several parchment aeroplanes already fluttered against the door of the compartment, mimicking the dour September rain that beat at the windows opposite.

“I don’t think it’s about Quidditch, Wormtail. People have seen Father’s campaigning to be Minister for Magic. Now I’m wanted for my fame as well as my sportsmanship. They think I’ve got brains as well as brawn!”

“Of course you have,” said Remy Lupin pleasantly from her perch on the opposite bench; she already had _A Guide to Advanced Transfiguration_ propped open in her lap and kept one eye on the proceedings, and the other on the second chapter. “I can’t always be the only one around here who thinks.”

Jo lifted Saoirse’s stockinged legs and commandeered a third of the bench for herself. “I’m practically a public figure.”

“You’re a bighead, is what you are, Prongs.”

“And you’re a layabout, Padfoot, but at least you’ve got your looks.”

A tickled grin played at the corners of Jo’s mouth as she propped her Quidditch boots against the window and strong-armed her way into another six inches of bench. Saoirse was convinced Jo didn’t own any other kind of shoe. She was always wearing these, and it was only sixty percent for the general aura of them. Saoirse exclaimed in protest at the loss of part of her bench, but in truth, she didn’t mind. She was grinning, not least at the fresh nicknames that still sparked on her tongue like the best of new secrets.

It was the fact of the day—of September first, of Hogwarts again—that had her feeling as if nothing could go wrong in the world. Remy Lupin had already built herself a fortress of crisp new spellbooks on half the compartment’s other bench, her brand-new prefect’s badge gleaming apologetically from a fold of her robes, and Pippa had collapsed into the space next to her with room to spare, though she was a fidgeter; if Jo had sat there, she’d be in a knot of flying elbows before they’d cleared London.

This was the order of things, the way their compartment always sorted itself on the day they returned to Hogwarts, and watching the pattern repeat itself warmed something in Saoirse’s chest that had gone deep and cold and tight over the holidays. She had forgotten what family felt like in the gloom of Grimmauld Place, the weeks that had stretched on in isolation because her mother had forbidden her the solace of visiting Jo for the first time this year—( _you will not be seen with that pandering, blood traitor family ever, especially not when they’re trying to strong-arm their way into a political office!_ ).

She’d almost run away right then and there; only Remy had convinced her she could make it six weeks. And she had. Here she was. With Jo, Remy, and Pippa, things were always easy. She could be herself again. She was home.

“Would you let those letters in? They’re becoming a nuisance,” said Saoirse, flinging an arm over her eyes dramatically.

Jo flicked her wand at the compartment door, which slid open a few inches so that three aeroplanes could squeeze eagerly through. A fourth zoomed down the corridor and slipped through the crack just as the door slid back shut.

“They could read the Prophet if they want to know what you’ve been up to over the holidays,” said Pippa, who already had reorganized her limbs into a cross-legged pretzel. Her hair rose in a short cloud of brunette curls, always looking one strong hair product away from tidiness. “You’re in there all the time. _Fleamont Potter Holds Talks With The Selkies. Fleamont Potter and Family Vacation in Wales to Woo Local Muggle-born Rights Activists_.”

“You must not be reading much of the Prophet anymore, Pip,” said Jo, ripping the first aeroplane jaggedly open while Saoirse snaked out a hand to snatch the second from where it hovered. “Suddenly all they can concern themselves with is the price of cauldrons. Talking about Muggle-born rights activists is too close to acknowledging the rise of Death Eater violence, which is too close to acknowledging that there might be enough of them out there now to influence the election of the Minister for Magic this fall. God forbid anyone addresses that.”

“Don’t you know, Prongs, if you don’t look at the dragon, it can’t breathe fire at you,” said Saoirse lightly.

The dark, tight thing in her chest had contracted again at Jo and Pip’s exchange. Remy looked up for the first time from her books, peering out from the curtain of her pale, straight hair to examine Saoirse. There was a knot of concern at her brow and a penetrating expression in her narrow brown eyes, as if she knew everything Saoirse was burying beneath her jokes.

Which, to be fair, she did. Saoirse had been exchanging letters with Jo and the others all summer, and hadn’t held back about the uptick in visits from her mother’s unsavory friends—the Blacks were the first vultures to anything that smacked of Dark magic, which meant He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named and the Death Eater thing that had begun to brew openly a few years ago was of course no exception.

Her letters had been scathing, sharp, and full of details: who stayed for dinner, who left with stained packages, who’d started wearing a glove or an eye patch or a hat that they didn’t before, suggesting a scar they’d rather keep hidden. Jo’s parents were always talking to the press about the threats to the vulnerable in the magical community, and if a few details got passed up the food chain, Saoirse could think of it only as the smallest penance for her upbringing.

But this summer had felt different. The longer she’d been at home, the worse she felt, like a black slime was oozing invisibly from the walls, seeping under the front door, grinding itself into the carpets under the heels of every black market dealer and ancient pureblood advocate who visited. The air had thickened with intent, and more of it than ever was whispered behind Charmed doors and at hours so late even Saoirse didn’t keep them.

She’d begun to fear she was going to drown in it all, and she’d written Remy a few times privately, letters that were not for the round-owl exchange that they usually maintained: one missive passed into all four sets of hands in turn so they could keep up on each others’ news.

No, these letters had been of a more desperate sort. Things she’d scribbled in the dead of night, things that felt like peeling back her ribs to show her heart leaking blood, sent in the witching hour by owl only to regret it first thing in the morning, no matter how gentle and prompt Remy’s responses always were.

_I’m serious, Moony, I’ll hex myself just to get a bed at St. Mungo’s if I have to endure another week of this._

_No, I can’t tell Prongs; she’ll call in the cavalry to rescue me and then my mother will burn her father’s entire election campaign down._

_How much trouble d’you think I’d be in, Wizengamot-speaking, if I taught myself to Apparate and just showed up in Norway at your cabin? Surely they’d let me off anything serious on account of my being underage. I’d go to Wormtail but it’s a bit daunting to think of Apparating all the way to Australia as a novice; what if I Splinch and all she gets is my excellent arse?_

Saoirse turned at once from Remy’s examination and, rather over-viciously, tore open the letter she’d intercepted, forcing her thoughts away from the anxiety and the fear that constantly, invisibly, threatened to drown her.

“Look here,” she said. “You’ve been invited to pop into the opening house for the Gobstones Gabbers, courtesy of Adolfus Rhodes, who would ‘love to catch up about both your summers.’ Think you've got time for that before Quidditch tryouts?”

All four of them mimed gagging in unison, Remy galvanized into a suitable distraction. She tucked her pale hair behind both ears and closed the _Advanced Guide to Transfiguration_ , fully joining the conversation. “Is he ever going to take the hint?”

“He’ll be attempting to invite me to Gobstones Gabbers on my very own wedding day, I expect,” said Jo, with dramatic weariness. “I’ve resigned myself to it. But look—this one’s a ‘cordial invitation to the first meeting of the Wizard’s Chess Club.’ I could go for some Wizard’s Chess, you know. I need a bit more for my intern applications next summer…”

"You do not," said Saoirse scathingly; playing Seeker as well as Jo did accounted for all the important sort of fame.

“It would have to be something else, anyway,” said Remy. “They meet on the full moon.”

“The full moon!?” Jo scoffed. “Who bothers with a finicky schedule like that? It’s going to jump around every month.”

“I don’t know,” said Remy mildly, “but it’s a shame. I’ve played you, and you’re better than half those louts with one eye shut.”

Jo was already tearing into her third envelope. Saoirse snagged the fourth, which was a lush, creamy paper with red-stained edges.

“This one’s got to be good, right?”

“Ooh,” said Pippa, leaning even further forward and nearly toppling off the bench. “That paper!”

“To the attention of Miss Saoirse—Black—”

Saoirse sat up, her fingers turning to ice on the paper. The other three turned to her as one, but it was Remy’s stare she felt like a Body-Bind Curse, heavy with all the things Saoirse should have kept to herself.

“ _It is time you settle where your loyalties lie. Things will be different at Hogwarts this year. It is time to stand by the blood you have so roundly forsaken, or face the consequences. You will not be warned again_.”

Pippa exploded from the bench. “Merlin’s beard! What does that mean?”

“Let me see that,” snarled Jo, snatching the parchment from Saoirse’s numb fingers and turning it over. There was nothing written on the back and no signature. The handwriting was spiny and peevish, but unfamiliar. The only defining mark at all, really, was the quality of the parchment and the stained edges. It stank of old wizarding family, old money, pure blood. But so did the message. The paper gave away nothing new.

Pippa approached the parchment as if it might snap at her. “It looks as if it’s been dipped in blood!”

“Can’t be blood, or it’d have dried brown,” said Remy reasonably, her eyes darting to Saoirse and then away. “Don’t lose your head, Wormtail.”

“It’s just red for Gryffindor. You know. The house I should never have been sorted into.” Saoirse plucked the parchment bleakly from Jo’s hands, having unfrozen into a terrible blackness, and rummaged her wand out of the folds of her cloak. “ _Incendio_.”

The parchment went up in a sudden flare. Jo leapt up with a cry of complaint—“You’ll light the carpet!”—but the paper was ash before it hit the ground.

Saoirse stowed her wand briskly to hide the tremor in her fingers. All four of them were standing now. Remy had upset some of her books onto the floor, and Pippa was staring wildly out the compartment door as if the letter writer might be lurking in the corridor. Jo’s shoulders heaved with alarm, but Saoirse looked back at her as blandly as she could manage. “There. Creepy parchment gone.”

“You just burned the evidence!”

“Of what, exactly?”

“Of who it is that thought it’d be good fun to threaten you!”

“I wouldn’t call that a threat, so much as an amateur attempt at humor,” said Saoirse blandly. “A bit dark for me. Cuts too close to the bone on current events. Really reeks of some jealous Slytherin job, but what pureblood shit doesn’t?”

“Saoirse,” said Remy, quietly, “are you all right?”

_It’s Padfoot_ , Saoirse wanted to snarl. Padfoot was her Hogwarts self: the prankster and the adventurer and the looks to Jo’s exuberant ringleading. Padfoot was the name that matched the persona that made her Gryffindor and it was all she wanted to be when she was with her friends in private, and she could choose those sorts of things..

But she would not yell at Remy.

“Course I’m all right,” she said instead, almost brightly enough. “Listen, Moony, ever since we got the animagi thing sorted last spring, I’ve been worried what we were going to occupy ourselves with this year. I need goals, or I get bored. But now we’ve got a goal: figure out who this little shit is, and give em hell for trying to mess with the Marauders.”

Just as she finished, the mournful wail of the horn snaked in through the windows and the compartment lurched. Pippa frowned out the window.

“Are we slowing down?”

They were. But worse, as soon as she asked it, the lamps guttered violently and went out.


	2. A Mythic Portent

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Characters:
> 
> Regina Black = Regulus Black
> 
> _____

“ _Lumos_.”

Pippa’s wand tip came aglow, casting the compartment in green light that glinted strangely in the girls’ wide eyes as the mutters of confused students rose in the corridor.

“You don’t need that,” said Jo irritably. “It’s daylight.”

“Not properly,” Pip protested, which Remy agreed with.

The train had stopped; rain roared against the metal roof, and the window was blue gray with cloud-stifled noon. It might have been November in a hurricane for all the light the windows granted. It was eerie. Remy had made her peace with eerie things over the years by necessity, but it didn’t mean she welcomed them. She drew her wand, more from instinct than anything else.

“Something’s wrong.”

A dark shape blurred past the window over Saoirse’s left ear.

“What was _that_?” squeaked Pippa, whirling.

Jo crowded the window alongside Saoirse as an icy, deathly cold began to steal through Remy. Somewhere up the car, a chorus of shrieks rose from another compartment. Something was very bad, bad like it would never be right again, Remy could feel it in her bones. And then—

“Bollocks,” murmured Saoirse, uncharacteristically serious. Her hair was still mussed from her dramatic tumble across the compartment bench and silhouetted in the tarnished light, she looked like a Medusa. Some mythic portent.

Remy opened her mouth to ask, _bollocks what,_ but the icy feeling seized her and all she managed was a gasp before she was falling down a long, dark tunnel, and the air hummed with a low, beastly snarl, the same one that had started a hundred of her nightmares.

She jerked, stopping the fall, and opened her eyes to a scene she’d relived so many times: her dark backyard, the picket fence gleaming in the light of a full moon, dewy grass pricking at her elbows, and a wolf’s muzzle looming over her sprawled child’s body, breathing hot, putrid air.

Yellow teeth.

Dribbling spit.

Wrinkled, half-furred skin.

Bloodshot eyes.

She howled and scrambled backward but it was too late and there was no getting away; she could only shut her eyes as the canines closed around her shoulder and tore—

“Moony! Moony!!”

The wolf shook her—tendons gave way—

“Remy, for god’s sake—”

She opened her eyes to find the moonlit backyard gone. It was Saoirse’s face hovering inches from hers, not the wolf’s. Panic twisted those full, ever-smirking lips and bold eyebrows into an expression Remy had never seen before on Saoirse. She looked like someone had cut her chest open and closed a fist around her heart. She looked like she might bleed out, she was that gray. She had one hand on Remy’s soft shoulder, nails digging in hard over the old scar, and the other hovered a whisper from Remy’s cheek, like maybe—well, maybe—

Then Remy blinked, and the whole thing was gone.

“Up you come.”

Saoirse hauled her to a swoony, dizzy sitting position on the grimy carpeted floor of the compartment. By the time Remy’s vision stopped whirling, her friend had rearranged her expression into a more characteristic grimness. Before—well. Well, that had just been a figment of her literature-charged imagination, she decided. As usual.

Remy took in Jo and Pippa at last, who hovered just beyond Saoirse, looking terrified. Pippa’s wand tip had gone out and Jo’s face was sallow.

“Bloody hell, Moony, what was that?” Jo asked, with a rare and complete lack of sarcasm.

“Did I trip?” she asked faintly.

But she knew she hadn’t.

Another of the dark shapes swooped past the window, blotting out the light for a moment and striking ice deep into Remy’s bones once more. But she was ready for the sensation and managed to steel herself against the blackness that stole over the edges of her vision.. She labored to her knees and put her face to the glass, trying to startle herself sensible with the cold. As if the sight beyond weren’t shocking enough.

Outside the stalled Hogwarts Express were Dementors. Dozens of them. They had descended on the train like a flock of migrating crows and now dive-bombed it one after the other with evident glee. Their robes trailed like rotting bat wings in the furious wind and, every time one came close, it seemed to suck more than joy from her bones—it sucked something essential, too.

There were so many of them. She knew the Death Eaters had been breeding the damned things, but—

There were just so many of them.

It was He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named’s doing. Her parents had whispered of incidents like this all summer; they’d chosen to conduct their research out of the country just to get her clear of it. It was not, after all, a wise thing to keep a child werewolf within a hundred miles of You-Know-Who’s known prowling grounds if one had any say in the matter.

Saoirse’s fist collided lightly with Remy’s aching shoulder.

“Perk up, Moony, can’t have you putting your face in that carpet a second time. You’ll get herpes.”

Saoirse said it bracingly, in her ordinary voice. But Remy thought the other girl didn’t look much better off than she felt. She hadn’t been grey with worry over Remy at all; she was grey with her own Dementor pallor, and though she had gotten to her feet, she swayed as if the train were still rolling, which it wasn’t.

Remy couldn’t help remembering the letters from the summer, the ones addressed not to _My Dear Marauders,_ or _Fellow Shameless Pranksters,_ or their three nicknames, but simply, to _Remy,_ often just like that with no _dear_ or _hello_ or anything ahead of it. Just her name, stabbed into the paper with a private kind of desperation, as if it were some sort of lifeline or prayer.

Dementors called up the worst memories locked away in a person. She knew, perhaps better than even Jo, what sorts of things Saoirse Black’s laughing facade kept buried.

She wanted to ask if Saoirse was all right, but she knew Saoirse would probably never forgive her for doing it.

The train lurched underfoot, sending Pippa sprawling against the compartment door. They had started to move again, and at the train’s revival, the Dementors began to scatter, slowly and reluctantly, vultures called off a corpse for the time being. The movement seemed to stir Jo back to her usual decisiveness.

“We need chocolate,” she declared, producing a handful of Sickles from her robes pocket and thrusting them at Pippa. “Go get some from the trolley, would you?”

“I’ll go,” said Saoirse hurriedly, as if she had sensed Remy on the precipice of the thing and wanted to get far away from the question. From Remy.

“Don’t be silly, Padfoot, you’re about to pass out. Sit here.”

While Pippa dashed out the door, leaving it half open, Jo planted them both on the same bench of the compartment and began to fuss profusely. When Jo was uneasy, Jo took charge of whatever was most directly in front of her: catching a golden Snitch, filling an awkward silence with a smart joke. She wasn’t good at fussing over people, but if it was the only thing available for her to do, she’d take a stab at it.

Remy had been fussed over enough in her lifetime, but she sat back and let it happen. Truth be told, she wanted moment in her own thoughts, under cover of Jo’s mounting monologue and Saoirse’s witty interjections, to remember that strange look on Saoirse’s face. She wanted to turn it over and over in her mind like a stone she meant to polish, to see if it really shone.

She didn’t get the moment, though, because Regina Black appeared quite suddenly in the open compartment door.

Regina was two years Saoirse’s senior, but it always stunned Remy how alike the sisters could look, despite the identical school robes and Regina’s indulgent commitment to the role of _evil twin._ They had the same wild black waves and way of moving like a storm escaping a bottle, frenetic and unpredictable; Remy had confused them more than once from behind in the Hogwarts hallways. But she’d never catch Saoirse with this sort of expression on her face. Like the glee you’d feel over watching someone else step in dog shit.

Regina checked her hip against the door, crossed her arms so that the dangling Slytherin scarf at her neck just brushed her sleeves, and smirked.

“It’s early in the term to be looking this peaked, Seersh. You haven’t been huffing doxycide or some other ghoulish thing already?”

Saoirse gave her sister a malevolent look. “Glad you dropped by, in fact. I’ve always suspected you’re an inferi in disguise, and the fact you’re waltzing around post-Dementors looking same as always is a great piece toward my theory.”

Regina curled her lip in a sneer, and turned to Remy.

“You’re meant to be in the prefect’s carriage. Didn’t realize being Head Girl meant I’ve got to shepherd my Prefects about like First Years.”

“Can’t you see she’s ill?” Jo said furiously. “She’ll come by later, when she can walk.”

Regina shrugged. “Isn’t little Remy always ill, though?”

Remy rubbed at her scarred shoulder involuntarily, but at the subtle flick of Saoirse’s gaze sliding to her, she dropped her hand. Better not to call attention to it. Better to never, ever, do anything that might give it away. She felt cold all over again.

Her whole life centered on this secret. Making sure as few people as possible asked questions about why she was out sick every full moon. Even her relationship to her best friends centered on her, as Jo called it, _furry little problem;_ she loved them each to pieces and she’d do anything for them, but, well. You didn’t just become an unregistered animagus because it was a Tuesday and you felt like it; you did it because you had to.

Okay, maybe Saoirse would do it because it was a Tuesday, but that was beside the point.

Remy had poured too much of her life into keeping her werewolf side in close confidence, and at Regina’s cold gaze narrowing on her and Saoirse slumped on the compartment bench still looking like only half of herself, she couldn’t help but think—maybe none of it had been enough. Maybe the whole school was going to find out one day, sooner rather than later, and nothing bold Jo or softhearted Pippa or fierce Saoirse did would be able to help her once it happened.

“We’re starting without you in five minutes,” said Regina finally. Her eyes flicked across Jo and Saoirse’s sullen, resentful postures. “If she starts giving you lot undeserved slack like she did last year, it’s going to come up to me to deal with it. Think about how that will go before you start rabble rousing this year.”

Regina turned on her heel, leaving a brittle silence in her wake. It was only once she was out of earshot that Jo said hotly, “I don’t think about _anything_ before I rabble rouse. What would be the point in _that_?”

It all dissolved cathartically into laughter at that, but privately, the aftereffect of the scare burrowed deep into Remy, nesting against her collarbone where she kept her ever-growing collection of scars.


	3. Misdeeds Over Pumpkin Juice

Just being inside Hogwarts' stone walls again felt fortifying, but Saoirse was itching for a fight, and the First Years had been quick across the lake and were already waiting in the Entrance Hall.

“Save me a seat,” she said to Jo and the others as they dashed in out of the cold rain into the lamplit castle. She needed a word with her sister, and she didn’t feel like waiting for a butterbeer to take the edge off her temper before she did it.

Regina towered amongst the little knot of First Years waiting outside the Great Hall. She always looked a bit like a vampire as it was; she was white as a ghost from being indoors all the time, and had started putting indigo in her hair last year to make it blacker. But the school robes were really what did it. They should have blended her into everyone else, but maybe she had Charmed hers to be longer or more billowy or something; they took up more than their share of space, and she loomed unnaturally in a crowd that was too short for her like a gothic scarecrow. The shrimpy little kids shrank away from her subconsciously.

Saoirse hated it. She hated that Regina was always gathering the weak and unremarkable and titchy to her because it made her seem powerful in comparison. Regina didn’t have enough gravitas on her own; she never had. It was probably why their mother’s diatribes about _blood_ and _family_ and _the proper order of the Wizarding World_ had always worked so well with her. Reggie _needed_ all that codswallop to feel significant. There was nothing to her, on her own.

Saoirse couldn’t tell if she felt more angry or heartbroken over this. Sometimes, to her, the feelings were indistinguishable.

As she crossed the hall, Saoirse conjured a cloud above Regina’s black hair.

“Oy. Ice queen.”

As she stalked closer, snow whirled down from the cloud in a fury, glazing her sister’s curls. One of the First Years gaped; another giggled. Regina tried to kill them with a glare. She waved her wand at the snow, attempting to Vanish it, but with a twitch of her own wand, Saoirse increased the precipitation.

“I want a word.”

“You could ask nicely!” Regina began swatting at the snow, which was falling so thickly they could barely see each other.

Saoirse snatched her sister’s elbow and dragged her free of the first years before Minerva McGonagall or the Head Boy, who were comforting a bawling little girl in box braids, could notice. A few more of the First Years were stifling giggles; tiny mountains of flakes had begun to build on the shoulders of Regina’s robes like fluffy epaulets. Saoirse threw the littlest of them a bold wink, making sure her sister saw it.

When she had reason to believe they were out of earshot, she hissed, “Did you send that foul note to our compartment?”

“What note?”

“The one about _being loyal to my blood,_ you runty thestral. Haven’t you tormented me enough over the holidays?”

Regina’s black eyes narrowed, a note of trepidation in them. “What in Merlin’s beard are you talking about?”

“At school we have a truce. You do your thing, I do mine, and no one has to know we’re related unless they hate themselves enough to look at you closely. Sending enchanted notes to my compartment that sound like the sort of thing Mother would pack in a lunchbox? That is _definitely_ crossing a line.”

“I didn’t send you any notes,” said Regina coldly. “I want to be as far away from your childish antics as possible. I’m of age and I have more important business than engaging in your self-important games.”

Regina wasn’t particularly given to lying, and there was something a bit horrified in her expression that didn’t seem faked. But Saoirse pressed the issue anyway.

“I’m telling you, this was one of your nasty little pureblood friends. It said something about loyalties and things being different at Hogwarts and that it was time to stop forsaking my upbringing. Don’t tell me your crowd likes it that there’s a Black running around Hogwarts who isn’t studying Dark magic on the sly. I know it’s not good for your image.”

Regina swelled, looked down her nose at Saoirse. They were both tall, but Regina had always had an inch on her younger sister, and she knew how to wield it when she wanted.

“You’re pureblood, too, Seersh. You can spend your whole life trying to escape that, but the world we’re making will benefit you, in the long run, whether you mean it to or not. You could stop being so high and mighty about it all.”

“I don’t want to be a part of anything you and your Death Eater friends create.”

“But you’re still part of the family.”

“Unfortunately.”

A cold expression went through Regina’s face: distaste mixed with some other, vaguely wounded thing.

“None of my friends care enough about you to threaten you, Saoirse, all right? This school, everything that happens here, is insignificant. I’m counting the days until I can get out of this backward little hellhole.”

“Yeah,” Saoirse snarled, feeling strangely defensive, and ready to say things she didn’t mean. “I can’t wait to see the back of you either.”

##

By the time the dinner dishes appeared on the long House tables, Saoirse was feeling rather incandescent. Normally by this point on the first day back, she was buoyant; nothing could touch her; everything was right in the world. But everything was simply off this year. Maybe it was the whole thing with the creepy letter, or seeing Remy’s pale face paler against the maroon carpet; maybe it was just the pent-up fury of six weeks in the mouldy walls of Grimmauld Place; or maybe it was nothing so specific as all that, but rather the general effects of the evil swirling in the air outside these castle walls as surely as the Dementors had swarmed their train carriage.

Sixth Year wasn’t allowed to feel this cursed. She wouldn’t have it. She had been looking forward to school as a very real lifeline for too many weeks, and she wouldn’t let the gloom beyond Hogwarts wrest it from her.

“Fancy a welcome feast prank, Prongs?” she muttered to Jo, who had just begun to tuck into a steak and kidney pie with gusto. Remy, across the table, was busy carving most of the browned bits away from her steak so only the pinkest parts remained.

Jo brightened, putting down her fork. “Ooh, always.”

“Help me enchant the napkins.”

Saoirse waved her wand under the table and made a napkin rise gracefully from the floor behind the Slytherin table. It tucked itself silently into the shape of a paper plane, just like the ones that had battered at their compartment door. The four of them had learnt nonverbal spells in their fourth year to better facilitate their pranks, so no one noticed the single napkin as it winged up amidst the hovering candles overhead, camouflaged against the brooding black enchanted sky.

Jo’s wand tapped Saoirse’s knee, and another napkin rose, this time from beside the plate of a nearby Ravenclaw. She startled, muttered, “ _Peeves_ ,” and kept on eating. By then, Saoirse and Jo were raising napkins in earnest. Six from down the Gryffindor table and a dozen from Slytherin simply because, and by now, students throughout the Great Hall had begun to spot them.

They pointed into the ceiling, where the candlelight guttered from the flight of so many napkins diving about through the flames. One got too close and caught fire, but kept on looping admirably about until finally both its wings had gone to stubs and it dropped in a fiery clump onto the Hufflepuff table, to general alarm.

“Got any sort of finale in mind?” Jo asked, grinning broadly, a bit of pie stuck between her incisors. Pippa looked as if Christmas had come early and Remy had stuffed her cheeks with mashed potatoes to stop herself laughing, because she was a prefect and really shouldn’t. Her stifled snorts which softened a corner of the blaze in Saoirse’s chest. But it was still burning, generally.

“Watch this,” she said calmly, and with a flourish of her wand beneath the table, she commanded the flock of napkins to attention. They sank below the candles to where they could clearly be seen, which drew the attention of the staff table at last. Too late, though; Saoirse was already arranging the assembly of airplanes into the shape of words.

EAT DUNG, YOU-KNOW-WHO

Then the airplanes reformed into a rude gesture. Professor Sprout rose from the staff table, flicked her wand sharply at the napkins, and vanished the lot of them, but not before a collective gasp, somewhere between fear and awe, had risen from the tables below. Saoirse looked up and down the Gryffindor table, grinning broadly, and received a shock.

Not many of them were grinning back.

There were of course plenty of dying-out snickers, but the merriment had died along with You-Know-Who’s name scrawled overhead in fabric. Pale, drawn faces turned surreptitiously to the air where the napkins had been, as if lightning might strike from the enchanted ceiling, as if the dark wizard himself could somehow have heard them laughing, which was just _ridiculous._

McGonagall stood up from the staff table, tapped her throat with her wand, and clapped her hands once for quiet, which was already half-achieved—the hall had fallen into muttering.

“I will thank the students of Hogwarts to conduct their inside jokes with a sense of general propriety that befits these trying times. Particularly our Sixth and Seventh Years, who, if I may be frank, should know better. There are students in this hall who have endured great personal tragedy at the hands of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named’s followers, and are likely not interested in being reminded of his misdeeds over their pumpkin juice.”

She pinned both Saoirse and Jo in her sights most severely. Jo made a desperate, strangled sound that was clearly a snort of laughter, but Saoirse felt frozen. A hot flush of — _embarrassment?_ — was creeping up her neck, spreading further at the sight of the little First Year with the box braids, who had started crying again.

But Saoirse never went back on a prank. _Never._ She raised her fingers in a fluttery little wave and grinned sheepishly, calling out, “Sorry, Professor!” in a tone that did not reek of any particular apology.

McGonagall’s lips thinned to near invisibility.

“See me after dessert to arrange your detention, Miss Black.”

Saoirse’s eyebrows shot up and the Hall around them rose in a buzz — some laughter, from the Slytherins and not a few Ravenclaws, some surprise from the Hufflepuffs, general laughter from the Gryffindors. It was a rather more mixed reaction than Saoirse usually got, and she felt the heat of the embarrassed flush spreading further across her skin. Jo made an apologetic face.

“Sorry, mate. Don’t know what’s gotten into her. Isn’t being a bit much… sort of your thing?”

Saoirse glanced across the table for Remy and Pippa’s eyes, suddenly, confusingly, in need of a lifeline. Pippa looked astonished and Remy, once again, a bit worried, which was not exactly the reassurance she had been looking for. All up the Gryffindor table, there were eyes pinned on her, waiting for her reaction.

The point had been to reinforce normalcy, hadn’t it? That was what she would do. Saoirse Black never flinched under a scolding.

“Well,” she announced lightly, loud enough for the students nearest to hear. “I think that’s got to be a record, don’t you think? Detention before the pudding’s even been served?”

It raised enough laughter to settle her.

Mostly.

#

McGonagall, it turned out, wanted Saoirse to come to her office the night before first classes and Transfigure a large pile of objects back into their original forms for the new term. This was hardly a chore, as Saoirse genuinely liked Transfiguration. Saoirse had grown up surrounded by the oldest and most mysterious forms of spellwork, but Transfiguration was the one thing that still managed to delight her after all the years of magical familiarity. She and Jo had been first in the year at the subject since long before Jo thought up the idea to become animagi.

So she set about turning beetles back into buttons and pin cushions back to porcupines, restoring the newly-living creatures to a rack of abandoned cages and the household objects into their tidily sorted bins on the opposite side of the room. At first it was grand. But McGonagall had settled herself at her desk to go over lesson plans, which left Saoirse in complete solitude with the work for almost half an hour, which in truth, was too much quality time with her thoughts.

She hadn’t been in a room this quiet since she left Grimmauld Place, and it was like her mind had decided to conflate the silence and the grim on a longer-term basis. Some of the half-transfigured objects were really quite disturbing. Slippers with twitching rabbit ears, owls with eyeglass arms instead of wings who blinked confusedly up at her as they tried to ruffle their feathers—it all put her in mind of the grim hangings on the walls at home, of Mother and Reggie bent over a cauldron on the hearth that most decidedly was not supper, murmuring and holding a box of stunned mice too close to the flame.

The shadows in McGonagall’s classroom moved, too; it was all the product of a cheerful fire burning in the grate, but once Saoirse noticed them, she kept mistaking the jumping dark edges for the swish of robes on tall shoulders. It could have been Antonin Dolohov’s brutish hulk behind that column, or the twitchy Amicus Carrow crouched at the edge of the fire, eyeing Saoirse beadily, ready to spout yet another of her eager, gruesome offers of Dark magic lessons— _fancy learning to cast cursed fire today, little Saoirse? We just let a bit loose in Surrey the other weekend; you should have seen the little Muggle fire men trying to put it out; ooh, how they scrambled! Want a demonstration now? Here, I’ll just conjure a little—_

There was a loud crash, and Saoirse looked down to see that one of the teapots she was meant to be reverting to tortoises was now on the floor in shards. She must have squeezed it, or—dropped it, or something.

“ _Reparo,_ ” she muttered, drawing the shards back together, then replacing the teapot on the desk to have another go.

“I think that’s enough for now, Miss Black,” said McGonagall abruptly, looking up at last. “Why don’t you put those away and come have a sit down with me?”

“I’m sure all its legs will still be attached when I Transfigure it back, Professor,” Saoirse said, over-brightly. “I’m pretty good with repairs.”

But when McGonagall narrowed her eyes, Saoirse obediently replaced the teapot with its fellows and came to the front of the room, where she took the chair opposite her professor and swung her boots onto the corner of the desk.

“Abso _lutely_ not.”

Saoirse put her feet back on the floor. “Always worth a try.”

McGonagall examined Saoirse for a moment with uncomfortably piercing eyes, then pinched the bridge of her nose above where her glasses rested. There were more gray hairs in her dark chignon than there had been at the end of last term. She shoved a tin across the desk to Saoirse. “Biscuit?”

Saoirse looked at the tin dubiously, then plucked a little jam biscuit from the top and flourished her wand at the treat, which expanded at once into a three-layer confection with bright pink icing that upset several stacks of parchment onto the floor with its size. “How about a sponge cake instead?”

McGonagall didn’t even go for the papers. She just frowned at Saoirse. “Did you get on all right over the holidays, Miss Black?”

Saoirse wasn’t sure what to do with the strange, moderated note in McGonagall’s voice. It sounded awfully too close to sympathy for her liking. She leaned forward, resting her elbows on the desk, and spoke conspiratorially.

“You know, Professor, there have been an awful lot of Dark wizards coming through as usual, and I know the Headmaster has some sort of spy network tracking the movements of You-Know-Who’s followers—if you like, I could pass on some of the names, some of the things I saw—”

“You are underage, Miss Black,” McGonagall interrupted her, “and should be focused on your studies. The best way for you to contribute to the war effort is by fostering a healthy learning environment for your fellow students, who will be your peers in the fight against him one day. Conducting tasteless pranks over dinner does not facilitate this.”

“That was a nice bit of Charms work, that,” said Saoirse hotly.

“Miss Black,” said McGonagall, her tone turning more serious. The sharp edges had come off her tone, replaced with directness. Saoirse preferred the severity. “While I do not care to involve you in an espionage network, I want to express that if there is anything going on at home that has been… hard for you to handle, you may come to me about it. I am your Head of House; it is what I am here for.”

Saoirse had no idea what to say to this; she threw up her internal defenses faster than a Shield Charm, before any untoward feeling could slip out.

“Remy talked to you.”

“Miss Lupin has not said a word to me,” said McGonagall steadily. “It happens that I have my own set of eyes.”

“I’m fine,” Saoirse said automatically. She didn’t dare examine whether this was true.

McGonagall let silence hang for a moment, as if Saoirse might change her answer, but Saoirse held her ground. At last, the professor sighed.

“Then you may go. But the offer is standing, Miss Black. And I expect better from you than scaring First Years by invoking the name of You-Know-Who over pasties.”


	4. Hiccoughing Solutions

The hour at which they had to rise for breakfast before their first Double Potions was simply morose.

“I know I say this every year—but the homework is going to _murder me._ ”

Pippa dropped a stack of textbooks on the table that looked equal to her body weight and slumped onto the bench next to Saoirse. She had not achieved the O.W.L. grade she needed to continue in Potions, but the reading material she was carrying looked no less intimidating for it. She had gotten up with the others just to get ahead on the reading. Saoirse, on the other hand, had not cracked a single one of her textbooks, as she believed in putting off academic anxiety to her future self wherever possible.

“How is there so much before classes have even started?” Pippa began pouring herself some pumpkin juice. “Even you can’t be caught up, Remy.”

Remy began to answer in the sheepish affirmative, but her sleepy morning voice was overshadowed by a clamor at the neighboring table, where someone had upset an entire tureen of scrambled eggs onto the floor with a tinny crash—“ _oh! well, the Self-Serving Charm is quite tricky, you see, quite tricky—_ ”

Without raising her head from where it was pillowed on her arm, Saoirse shoved a plate of bacon under Pippa’s nose. “Cheer up, Wormtail, it’ll only kill you if you carry all those textbooks at once without a Hover Charm.”

Pippa speared a floppy slice of the bacon. “You _know_ I’m hopeless at Hover Charms.”

“Your problem,” said Jo, saluting Pippa with a bit of toast, “is confidence. You’ve got to get out of your own way, Pip; it’s not as if you’re Lockhart.”

Jo had been up two hours already to get private time on the Quidditch pitch and delivered this speech with criminal cheer. The rest of them barely managed a collective, exhausted eye roll in the general direction of the Ravenclaw table, where the aforementioned second-year Lockhart was waving his wand at the spilled eggs the way one might scold a puppy. The eggs lay soddenly on the floor, unmoved.

Pippa watched dourly. “If I ever get that bad, just let me walk into the lake for the giant squid to eat.”

“Oy,” Saoirse elbowed Jo, perking up fully for the first time. “It’s Evans.”

Jo whirled, then tried to pretend as if she hadn’t. But Saoirse and the others had no qualms about watching Lily Evans avidly as she crossed the Great Hall to alight at the Hufflepuff table, also looking awfully fresh for the early hour. Her dark hair had been scraped back into a no-nonsense bun tied with a yellow ribbon, and her brown skin looked freshly scrubbed from the showers.

“She’s just glowing,” said Saoirse scathingly. “God, you two were made for each other. Who _enjoys_ anything about the morning other than breakfast?”

Jo’s entire face had gone scarlet. “I—ran into her when I was headed down to the quidditch pitch this morning,” she said.

“Ooh!” Remy leaned forward over the bench. “ _And_?”

Jo speared herself some bacon as if vanquishing an enemy. “ _And_ nothing. The usual.”

“Cold shoulder? Ouch.” Remy winced.

“Evans doesn’t cold-shoulder anyone, she’s a good Hufflepuff,” Saoirse said impatiently. “She was just bland to you again, wasn’t she?”

“She made that face. With the eyebrows. The one like I was a spider in her bathroom.”

“In her defense, Prongs,” said Remy fairly, “she’s obligated to be like that, when you make such a sport out of tormenting her boyfriend.”

“He’s the _worst,_ though,” said Pippa scathingly.

Jo’s face went even darker. “And they’re not dating!”

But, as if Lily had heard somehow from halfway across the hall, she rose from the Hufflepuff table with a slice of beans on toast and flitted one row over to the Ravenclaws, where Severus Snape drooped over a bowl of porridge, perking up only when Lily dropped onto the bench next to him.

“Someone had better tell that to Snivellus,” said Saoirse carelessly, and reached for the toast. Jo, subjected to the debacle of Snape and Evans’ inexplicable closeness, had lost the sharpest edge of her offensive cheer, and this had inspired Saoirse’s appetite.

They all trouped together down to Potions not long after, the younger students flocking off to other subjects, including Pippa, while the N.E.W.T. level Potions group wound down the slippery basement stairs to Slughorn’s dungeon classroom. Saoirse was afforded a wholly overlong stretch of time to examine the back of Severus Snape’s greasy head as they descended.

If Reggie aspired to be a human bat, Snivellus had already ascended to it. His condescension cemented the thing. He had the same skeletal frame as her sister and the same appearance of billowy, overlarge robes, but he’d perfected a sneer that lingered derisively and permanently on the bridge of his brittle nose—a sneer that said everyone around him had greasy flobberworms for brains.

The worst thing was the weight he could throw behind it. Snivellus knew _everything._ He’d probably read the entire library by third year; these days, he was always lurking in the dustiest and most restricted sections, scribbling notes in a sea of parchment. Saoirse had bet Jo ages ago that Madam Pince had a crush on him. And he was too savvy to make a fool of himself spouting off in class about it all; no, he’d sit in the back, or in the middle row as a compromise with Evans for any class they shared, and just _smirk_ his way through everyone else’s answers and clumsy demonstrations of the assigned spellwork.

It was too bad all that knowledge hadn’t done anything for his evident lack of conscience, or Saoirse would nearly be forced to admire him. As it was, knowing everything must have gotten boring; Snivellus was studying Dark magic in his off hours now. Saoirse only knew how far it had gone because she had begun hearing more about him from a breathless, awed Reggie than she had from the increasingly romantically frustrated Jo.

At least she could safely reassure Jo in her most despondent moments that yes, Lily Evans was worth a hundred Severus Snapes, and of course, Lily Evans would see that any day now, and stop sitting next to him in Potions.

Today wasn’t that day though.

“Welcome!” boomed Slughorn expansively from the front of the class. “Welcome, welcome to a new crop of N.E.W.T. Potions students, and congratulations on the fine work at O.W.L level that has brought you to this point. This year we will begin the true _art_ of potion-making; the little tricks that elevate a potion maker from serviceability into mastery…”

The excellent thing about Potions had always been the way Slughorn adored the sound of his own voice. In other classes, Saoirse’s concentration would be necessary from the first minute, but Slughorn could be depended upon to ramble, particularly on the first day, which gave her plenty of opportunity to scan the classroom as she made a pretense of leveling her brass scales. Potions tended to be one of the promising stages for mischief when things got too boring, and she wanted a good stock of her options.

Diggle and Vane were seated at the frontmost desk, which was a shame. For most of fourth year, Saoirse had sat behind them flicking doxy eggs one by one into their cauldrons until Diggle was hopping with nervous confusion and Vane practically had steam coming out of her ears. Neither had never figured out why their potions always turned out smelling like old curtains.

They were too far away this year to repeat the prank, though. Saoirse had set up beside Jo in the back row, with Remy beside Georgie Shunpike at the table directly in front, and if she even tried it, she knew she could not pretend to miss Remy’s glances of disapproval. Remy might even redirect the doxy eggs into Saoirse’s own cauldron again if she was quick enough with her wand.

As much as Remy loved a good prank, she staunchly believed in inflicting them on those who deserved it, and did make an exception to Saoirse and Jo. It was an abominable breach of Marauder trust, but Saoirse couldn’t be angry. Remy was simply too good-hearted to be sensible sometimes. Right now, she was bent over her parchment, her quill scratching away dutifully at some notes, even though Slughorn was making a speech of prodigious unimportance. Bless her.

Pleasantly, Evans and Snape had settled much more within reach at the table across from Remy. Evans was on the near side and Snivellus slouched near the wall, looking bored enough to die, but Saoirse knew it was because he probably wished he could replace Slughorn and teach the class himself, so she could feel no solidarity.

“…Today’s task will be to brew Hiccoughing Solutions!” proclaimed Slughorn at last. “You may collect the necessary ingredients up front in the store cupboard… and there will be, oh my, just over an hour and a half to complete the brew. I’ve really chattered on, haven’t I?” He chuckled heartily. “Hop to it, and remember, perfection isn’t necessary, I merely need a barometer of your skills…”

There was a general stir as the whole room rushed up to collect ingredients and settled down to work. Neither Saoirse nor Jo had managed to find the page with the instructions yet, so Remy shared her supplies. By the time steam rose from their four cauldrons, Snape was already on step five, mashing billywig wings and borage together into a poultice.

“How does he always _do_ that?” Jo muttered waspishly, spilling a beaker of measured river water and cursing as she was forced to pour it all over again. “Thinks he’s some great showoff because he can keep up with Evans down here, just look at him basking in it—”

Evans had always been the star in Potions. She had an instinct. She was forever going off script and finishing early, then, instead of doodling hearts or breasts in her notebook like an ordinary person, moving on to cook up original recipes on the side that made Slughorn squeal with delight. She had become such a teacher’s pet that Saoirse thought if she ever did make a horribly drastic mistake, like melting out the bottom of her cauldron, Slughorn would probably give her full marks regardless and buy her a new copper one as a replacement.

“He’s not keeping up with Evans, he’s copying off her,” said Saoirse calmly. “At least in part. Watch--they’re acting like it’s some sort of group project—”

The two were sharing a Potions textbook. As Jo looked up, Snivellus snatched it from Evans’s side of the table and made a spindly little note in the margins before pushing it back; Evans peered at the handwriting and nodded in affirmation, then scraped an extra gram of the billywig wing poultice into her cauldron in one deft movement, her full lips pursed in concentration.

Saoirse leaned forward, a thought sparking in her mind. The creepy parchment from the train had, presumably, originated in the hands of a fellow Hogwarts student, which meant it would be possible to make a match to the handwriting if she paid enough attention to her classmates. She regretted burning the note for the first time. Her memory of the jagged scrawl was growing a bit muddy. It had been a thin, slanted sort of script, seething with irritated energy, which honestly was not so far off from Snivellus’ entire aesthetic—she leaned further—

The potions textbook whisked out of sight behind Snape’s cauldron. He had caught her peeking, and glared back at her and Jo with dark dislike. “Do your own work, Black. If you’ve got any brains left in there to use for it.”

“Some of us have got lives to attend to outside the library. It doesn’t make us dim.”

Snape sneered. “Speak for yourself. Potter’s been hit in the head with so many bludgers, I’m surprised she can still put a sentence together.”

“Sev,” muttered Lily wearily, without looking away from the lavender boil issuing from her cauldron. Snivellus stood down, because Evans was the only person he ever stood down for. But not before glancing into Saoirse and Jo’s cauldrons and letting loose a derisive snort. Saoirse’s potion was green, and Jo’s, smoking.

“Don’t worry,” said Saoirse, her chest hot with dislike. Jo had turned red in the face, and scrambled to stir down the burning substance at the edges while muttering incoherently under her breath. “I’ve got it.”

Remy glanced around, having superhumanly heard this somehow, and raised an eyebrow in warning. Saoirse just tipped her head at Jo, who was scraping sweaty bits of hair from her face and sucking in a wild breath through her nose in a weak attempt at decorum. They couldn’t let her suffer in this state undefended.

“Jo,” mouthed Saoirse, gesturing at the jar of billywig parts on the edge of their table. Jo scooped it up and tossed it with a Seeker’s sure grace into Saoirse’s waiting palm. It was easy enough after that to pretend to be stirring her potion counter-clockwise, toward a more purplish sort of green, while levitating a few billywig stingers into the rafters over Evans’ and Snape’s cauldrons.

She waited to drop the stingers in until Snivellus’s nose was bent to the textbook and Evans had gone up front for more river water. But she must have misjudged how far she’d levitated them. It was Evans’ perfectly mauve solution that rose into the air in a great, jiggling orb, not Snape’s.

Saoirse leapt back, chagrined, as Snape surged to his feet and Slughorn, near the front tutting over Diggle’s cauldron, whirled about.

“What’s this?”

“Fix it,” Jo hissed. “Fix it now!”

Saoirse raised her wand, but Diggle, apparently eager to make a good impression after whatever disappointing mess he’d made in his cauldron, jabbed his wand fervently at the undulating mass of potion, which promptly burst, splattering purple liquid everywhere. In seconds, everyone was hiccoughing, transforming the dungeon’s clamor into what sounded like a chorus of strange, drunk frogs.

Unfettered by any particular attachment to Lily Evans, Saoirse burst out laughing—and hiccoughing—and laughing again in turns. The scene was magnificent. Georgie Shunpike squeaked with every inhale and Snivellus’s robes flapped like bat wings at every convulsion of his shoulders and Slughorn was madly attempting to restore order, but could only get a few words out at a go—“Please— _hic—_ settle down— _hic—_ at your desks— _hic—_ there’s an antidote in— _hic—_ the cupboard!”

It was raucously fun—at least until she turned to Jo and saw the panic on her face, then spotted Evans advancing on their back table, fury in her hazel eyes, the bits of green in them like sparks. Snivellus, behind her, had somehow begun sneezing on top of the hiccoughs.

“Do you think,” Evans thundered, “That the pair of you could take one _single_ thing seriously for one _single_ class period?”

Jo beamed desperately. “It’s _double_ Potions, Evans, and we’re— _hic_ —on to the second period now.”

She planted her hands on her hips. “This material matters! This is N.E.W.T. levels!”

“And it’s hardly necessary for a bunch of— _hic—_ future Ministry of Magic— _hic—_ parchment pushers,” Saoirse pointed out.

“It’s bold of you to assume there will even _be_ a Ministry of Magic by the time we’re of age,” hissed Lily, who had been shielded in the supply cupboard and was the only one whose diaphragm was not attempting to launch itself out of her throat. “Potion-making is a critical skill in these times—”

“Evans,” said Jo seriously, “you don’t mean to tell me you plan to _hiccough_ You-Know-Who to death?”

Evans’s gaze turned cool. “I know you meant to explode Sev’s potion, not mine. And I also know that anyone who values petty schoolgirl spats over preparing for what’s coming is not anyone I _ever_ want to be associated with.”

She spun on her heel back to her desk, where Snape was vanishing purple splatters from the pages of the Potions textbook.

“Full marks, Evans,” Slughorn beamed, having partaken of the antidote. “Though I suppose we didn’t need to test your brew _quite_ this thoroughly…”

“Slug Club privileges,” Saoirse muttered to Remy, who smirked. But Evans’ words picked at a sore spot in Saoirse’s brain that had been festering ever since Reggie’s lecture in the Entrance Hall. She _did_ care about what was going on outside the castle, after all; she just wanted to care about it later… and wasn’t that fair enough?

She hated do-gooders sometimes.

Her eyes flicked to Remy, who was usually a fair moral barometer. But Remy wasn’t looking at her; she was watching a morose Jo watch Evans pick a mauve spot out of Snape’s lank hair. Evans’ expression remained matter-of-fact but Snape’s had gone openly tender.

Saoirse made a face and clapped a hand to Jo’s shoulder bracingly. “Remember, Jo, Lily Evans isn’t going to run off with a wannabe dark wizard; she’s got a brain.”

Jo looked miserable even for someone with a pestle of whisked frog spawn in her grasp. “Maybe, but she’s certainly got no plans to run off with me, either.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> as a Ravenclaw, i take offense to the idea that dark wizards only come from Slytherin, so that's why you're getting Ravenclaw!Severus right now lol
> 
> (and Hufflepuffs are actually brave AF, i will die on this hill!)


	5. Sick Days

Pippa Pettigrew simply was not up to snuff.

She wasn’t as clever as Remy and she wasn’t as bold as Saoirse, and she certainly could never conceive of being as popular as Jo, who, upon bungling a Charm in front of an entire classroom, could simply take a bow and crack a joke, whereas Pippa’s only option would be to sink through the paving stones and bury herself in the Hogwarts foundations, if only she knew the magic to accomplish it.

Ordinarily she didn’t let this chronic imbalance bother her, because it had never seemed to bother the other Marauders. But there was a different center of gravity to their circle of plush armchairs in the Gryffindor common room tonight, and Pip thought she might be the only one who saw it.

Her chair was a little too big for the space she’d crammed it into. She sat at an angle while the others faced each other, and could only see the side of Saoirse’s face; her dark curls fell across her cheek, obscuring her expressions. Jo had her feet over the arm of Saoirse’s chair as usual, and all three of them were conferring over the Potions essay they’d been assigned thanks to the incident involving Lily Evan’s cauldron that Remy had christened the _Great Hiccough Rain._

Jo seemed to have recovered from the embarrassment thereof, and had fallen to describing Georgie Shunpike’s earthshaking hiccoughs in great detail to anyone who would listen—which, now that the common room was emptying for the night, was just Saoirse. Remy had an ear open, but she was busy writing the essay that eventually, Jo and Saoirse, who had not even unrolled their parchments, would be forced to copy from.

Meanwhile, Pippa was struggling mightily through a reading for Care of Magical Creatures. The other three had dropped the class because of the conflict with Potions. She _liked_ Care of Magical Creatures, she really did, but right now if she spotted a bowtruckle, she would have flung him straight into the fire from frustration as Jo and Saoirse burst into laughter over a joke she had missed in her losing bid to focus on the reading.

It wasn’t just tonight. Things had been a little odd on the train, and a little odd again at the Welcome Feast, and the oddness was persisting the further they settled into the year.

There had always been a balance between the four of them. Jo and Saoirse were partners in crime, and Remy and Pippa their willing audience or, at times, voice of reason. But something had tipped. Saoirse had a darker energy to her; she was a black hole bending the gravity of Remy nearer and leaving Pippa dangling precariously at the edge of the group orbit. Jo, absorbed by her new Quidditch captaincy, had not noticed, because Jo was a bit too popular to see the shadows sometimes cast by her own light.

Pippa had been afraid things would take a turn like this for a long time, but she’d always managed to head off the inevitable. She’d signed up for Muggle Studies with the others even though she’d had to get a tutor to make it through Charms because of it; she’d tried out for Quidditch three times even though she could fall off a broom without the help of a bludger. She had been running to keep up with her extraordinary friends for so long, because she adored them with her whole heart—she really did—Remy had taken her under her wing from the first day of their first year, and Jo and Saoirse never got upset with her for being so hopeless all the time—but she had always known that one day, she was going to run out of steam.

She turned another page, shrank away from the laughter that didn’t include her, and wondered—what if, this year, the other three simply kept going at their breakneck pace, never noticing the gap she left behind?

#

On the Saturday before the second week of classes, she and Remy found themselves on the school grounds, soaking in one of the last truly warm days of the year. Signups for Apparition lessons had gone around, which Jo and Saoirse had jumped on, but Pip wasn’t going to be of age until next August, so she felt there was no point to it until the spring. Remy, on the other hand, had abruptly developed a complex about the entire affair and refused to bother with it.

Pippa was secretly overjoyed to have Remy to herself for a little while, but it had been out of character for her friend to shy away from any academic challenge, and she did not want to let the issue slide.

“No one is going to figure out about you from Apparition practice, you know,” said Pippa, as they sprawled in the grass with a delicious stack of fresh parchment and textbooks. “It’s not as if you Splinch and one side of you turns wolf from the shock.”

“I just don’t like tight spaces,” said Remy thinly. She was already starting to look a bit wan and pale, as she always did in the days leading up to the full moon. “I’m going to learn, Pip, I just don’t want to do it in front of the entire year. You know how… I get, sometimes.”

Pippa immediately felt bad for pressing. The thing was that the incident on the train, with the Dementors, it hadn’t been the only time she’d ever seen Remy collapse, or curl into a ball unresponsive, or otherwise slip into the grip of memories. Pippa had only begun to understand what caused it when she finally mastered her animagus form in the spring, weeks after Jo and Saoirse.

Remy as a werewolf was… terrifying.

It was hardly Remy at all in that body; it was teeth and bristled fur and a snarl that Pippa could not place against the mild-mannered girl she had grown up across the street from. She knew there had been close calls over the years with Muggles and Remy’s parents, leading to a dozen different attempts to contain her on full moons. More than one of those had involved tight spaces or padlocked doors. Not because her parents were trying to be cruel; the first time Pip had heard one of these stories, she had been furious for Remy, until Remy told her that the padlocks were her own idea.

Because however terrifying Pip found the werewolf Remy, it was nothing to how terrifying Remy found herself. She closed herself off on full moons to protect others, but in doing so, she locked herself in with her own worst nightmare. Her personal terror lived under her skin; it always would; she would never be free of it.

Pippa put her hand on Remy’s arm, placating. “Are you ready for Wednesday?”

Remy’s voice had gone rather dim. “I just have to get the homework in advance from Flitwick.”

“Well, I’ve been dying to figure out that tunnel that branches off on the way the Shrieking Shack,” Pippa declared. What usually worked for Remy was to draw her out from the terror before it chewed her up as it always did when left unaddressed. “I’m pretty certain it ends up in the Forbidden Forest, from the way it bends.”

Remy laughed, though she still looked a bit wan. “You always did have a good head for that sort of thing, Pip. Maps and such. I bet if you were a Muggle in London, you could draw the Underground from memory.”

“I bet I could do it despite not riding it every day,” said Pip, warming all over. “But don’t worry, Moony, I’ll keep my focus on the school grounds for now. We’ve got to find some new places for you to explore while you’re changed, and the Forbidden Forest seems a ripe chance for adventure.”

The ghost of her fear from the other night still lingered—the way her chair had not quite fit, and the whispers she’d heard from Jo and Saoirse’s beds across the aisle long after they all drew their bed curtains. But Remy always managed to steady her, without even knowing she was doing it, and wherever Pippa could, she always tried to return the favor.

#

Remy grew tense over the following few days of class leading up to the full moon, and to Pippa, it was as if the general atmosphere at the school were taking its cue from her.

It started with the latest edition of the Prophet at breakfast, the front page splashed all over with a grisly headline: _Robert McGonagall Jr Murdered At Home, Culprits At Large._ The rumor was that Antonin Dolohov, who had once been an Auror, was responsible for the killing. This caused an immediate stir, as Robert was Professor McGonagall’s younger brother, and on Monday following hte news, Professor Flitwick substitute taught all her classes. No one could remember the last time McGonagall had taken so much as a sick day; she was a figure as fixed in stone as the Hogwarts gargoyles, and the entire student body was rattled to see a blow landed against her.

Saoirse seemed to take this news especially hard. She had a flinty, runaway-train way of being angry about things, and though Pippa asked her five times over lunch whether she was really all right and if Saoirse wanted to talk about it at all, but all she could drag from Saoirse was an apoplectic “ _She’s our head of house, of course I’m furious for her!_ ”

“The thing you’ve got to remember is,” Remy said to Pippa in a low voice on their way to Charms, “she’s been seeing a lot of these people going in and out of her house all summer, and she feels a bit responsible.”

Saoirse had, of course, written about the Death Eaters visiting her house, but it was news to Pippa that she’d ever been in the same room as Dolohov. Regardless, Remy’s explanation barely made any sense.

“What was she supposed to do,” she asked, slamming her Charms book open on the desk. “Curse him right in front of Walburga?”

“I’m sure she thinks so.”

“Well, they’d have mounted her head on the wall along with the house elves’ for it.”

“I know, Pip. Sometimes it’s hard to be rational when you’re upset, that’s all.”

What was hard, Pippa thought, was understanding what went through Saoirse Black’s head _ever_. Or understanding how Remy seemed to always have the pulse of it. When class was disrupted midway through by Saoirse mastering the Vibrato Charm on her bullfrog and subsequently commandeering everyone else’s subjects into a brassy, amphibian rendition of a new song by Weird Sisters, Remy didn’t even seem surprised so much as resigned.

But Pip had not managed to modulate her frog’s croak by so much as a half step, and was honestly rather upset with Saoirse for the distraction. This was how she was always getting so behind. She needed the full period of practice in her classes and alongside Saoirse and Jo, she rarely ever got it. She had just about worked up the courage to pull Saoirse aside after class and tell her as much, too, but then an odd thing happened that struck the task completely from her thoughts.

Jo and Saoirse swept out of class at the first clang of the bell, leaving Pippa scrambling to stuff her book bag while Remy, with dark shadows under her eyes as if she had not slept, went to the front to ask Flitwick for Wednesday’s assignments. At first, Pippa had thought they were the only two stragglers, but when she stood with her book bag over her shoulder, she realized that Severus Snape had hung back as well. He lurked in the most shadowed corner of Flitwick’s bright classroom, arms folded as he watched Remy and Flitwick conferring with a narrow-eyed, calculating sort of expression.

“Got questions for Flitwick, too?” Pippa addressed him coldly, breaking his concentration. “I saw your frog barely sang a single note. The shine had to come off of you eventually.” She had never mastered Jo’s art of the quip, but she steeled herself against Snape’s dismissive lip curl, listening to the wrongness twinging in her gut over the embarrassment of a jab that hadn’t really landed.

“I’m rather beyond Vibrato Charms.”

“Then what are you still doing here?”

Snape pushed away from his lean against the wall, eyes sliding back to Remy with the precision of a cat stalking through grass. “It’s odd, don’t you think, the way Lupin’s always asking for advance homework every month? Happens like clockwork. Almost like… it’s a cycle.”

Pippa’s heart went cold. She opened her mouth, fishlike, but waited one long, terrible misstep of a moment for a comeback to present itself. “She gets horrible cramps for her time of the month. Not that it’s any of your business.”

Snape’s expression did not change. “I’d expect an accomplished witch like Lupin to know the charm for handling that.”

“They’re—really bad cramps.”

He sniffed. “I suppose being around Potter will rot even the largest of brains.” He turned to go, but pinned Pippa with a cold look as he did. “But personally, I think there’s something else to it.”

He left Pippa standing there frozen as Remy turned from Flitwick with the homework, looking about as good as she had all day. Pip knew she couldn’t say anything. Not the night before full moon, not when Remy’s anxiety was always at its worst—it wouldn’t do Remy any good right now to know that Snivellus was scheming.

But soon—when the moon was waning again—she was going to have to.


	6. A Mismatched Pack

Remy rose hours before dawn on the day of the full moon with her bones aching.

It had been a week since she’d slept well, but truthfully, the exhaustion went deeper than a few nights of tossing and turning. It wasn’t possible to live life as she did, with your brain constantly buzzing _wrong, wrong, wrong,_ though everything was all right, and wake up ready to face the day. You simply woke up and faced it anyway.

But she knew things would feel a bit better once the full moon had passed. Three weeks would stretch untouched by the worst of her worries after tomorrow’s sunrise. She slid stiffly out of bed and drew her robes on, readying herself for the pre-dawn cold of the Hogwarts grounds, and was just pulling on her shoes when she realized Saoirse’s bedcurtains were open, allowing a sliver of silvery moonlight to fall across Saoirse’s face. Her friend was awake.

She watched Remy with dark eyes made even darker by the quiet bedchambers. Her expression was strange and unreadable. Or maybe it was unreadable because it seemed soft, and Remy never saw Saoirse acting soft. She wasn’t sure the two things could go together, tenderness and her wand-at-the-ready friend.

“Didn’t sleep much either?” Saoirse asked, her voice cracked with drowsiness.

“You know I never do.”

Saoirse’s eyes stayed on Remy’s. Remy couldn’t look away. It felt as if Saoirse was on the precipice of something. Secrets seemed to tremble on her lips, ready to spill over if they weren’t reined back in. As if by animal instinct, Remy thought that maybe, if she held very still, if she concealed the way her heartbeat had sped when she spotted the open bedcurtains, perhaps her friend would—

She didn’t know what, exactly. Say why she’d written all those terrified letters to Remy and not Jo this summer? Say something more direct than that?

“Don’t have too much fun before we get there, Moony,” Saoirse whispered, her words thin as the gossamer moonlight, but the tone teasing once again. The bubble popped; Remy relaxed and offered Saoirse a snort.

“Rest assured, I won’t.”

But as she descended the spiral staircase, curiosity tugged her backward, nearly as strong as the anxiety that tugged her forward. If she had stayed—if she had said something else before Saoirse spoke again—

What _would_ have happened?

All Remy knew was how much she lived for these secret moments. How much it would hurt to lose them, if she was wrong, if she forced the issue to satisfy her own wondering.

#

The Shrieking Shack, an old house on the hill above Hogsmeade, had been empty for decades. It was awful and creepy for the hours Remy spent in her human form there. She shivered for hours in the dusty master bedroom, shaken by fits of sneezing as she waited for darkness to fall and the change to take with the rise of the silver moon.

Still, even before the others had mastered their Animagus forms, she’d always been relieved for this place, despite its shabby grimness. It was the privacy she’d never had before school, the freedom to screech and groan as her body rippled into something larger and stranger and stronger than itself. In the Shrieking Shack, she could feel her pain, she could hurt without anyone trying to comfort her, she could be the part of herself that was not accepted outside its slowly rotting walls.

It wasn’t an easy life, but it was the easiest one she had known.

Pressure built inside Remy’s skeleton as the afternoon shadows stretched long across the master bedroom where she sat with her Transfiguration homework. When the light had sunk low in the branches of the Forbidden Forest, she packed up her schoolbooks and ordered them tidily under the bed along with her robes where she was unlikely to disturb them.

Then, as the sun vanished and the moon rose, she came apart.

Her spine elongated, her hands bulged and, dimly, she felt her face stretching into something that wasn’t itself at all before the rush of the change swept through her and none of it felt strange anymore.

The room, previously dim with shadows, became clear as day to her sharpened eyes, and through the boarded windows, her ears grasped onto new reaches of sound. The cloudy smells of dust and decay sharpened into more specific scents. Mouse droppings; bats in the eaves; a hundred small animals’ scent trails.

It was overwhelming and not enough all at once. Remy lifted her nose to the mold-spotted ceiling and howled with sudden, overwhelming hunger.

She set to scrambling through the house, testing the barred windows and locked doors. Human scents wafted past from the village of Hogsmeade beneath. The steaming bodies and smoky houses called to her.

Remy had to find her way to them. She had to free herself of this cage.

She clawed and scratched through the Shrieking Shack as the moon rose higher. Its light seeped through the cracks in the boarded windows freely, taunting Remy, maddening her further until a creak came from somewhere deep in the bowels of the house.

She was no longer alone.

Remy barreled down three flights of stairs, her muzzle twisted into a long, jagged-toothed snarl. She was ready. Ready to bite and tear at the bit of the world that had dared come near her.

In a shabby little room off the front hallway, part of the floor had peeled upward, out of which a great black dog clambered as a large rat darted between its paws.

Remy stopped.

Their scents were familiar.

Not just the dog’s furry musk and the rat’s tunnel dust, but something underneath which put crackling fires and idle spellwork and games of Exploding Snap into her mind. The images sat uncomfortable and odd against her wolfish awareness, but unmistakably aching with comfort.

Padfoot, she realized dimly. Wormtail.

She could not quite grasp onto what the names meant, only the comfort that they inspired.

She snarled anyway. This was _her_ house.

The great dog—the Padfoot dog—bounded at her with an answering flash of teeth. Remy leapt, unwilling to be cowed in her own den. They met in midair and rolled across the floor in a tumble of tails and fur and teeth, snapping at each other, but Padfoot’s hackles were down. It was a playful tussle. And again, the familiarity washed over Remy, and the snarl felt twisted against her jaw, unnatural and unnecessary.

They separated, and Padfoot barked, rumbling with joy. Remy howled back, feeling nearly playful. Padfoot’s tail wagged, sweeping up clouds of dust.

They were here. They’d come for her.

The rat that was Wormtail had stayed near the open hatch in the floor, squeaking wildly. She darted down into the dark and back up again, over and over.

Remy took this to mean they should follow. She hardly needed telling. The tunnel stank of cold earth and freedom. She streaked into the hatch with the rat scrambling at her heels and the dog close behind.

Remy had been locked up for hours, and their speed could not match her sheer desire for escape. The tunnel forked halfway down. One way smelled of more damp and the other of the promising loamy rot of open forest, so she took that path. There was an indignant squeak at this from somewhere behind—the rat—which Remy ignored.

She bounded through the knobbly, root-bound dark until she finally burst free into the trees with a howl of delight. All around were looming shadows and the scuttles of nervous animals. Remy settled on her haunches, orienting herself by the moon, and lifted her nose to the air to sift through the scents.

Somewhere out here were the humans whose nearness had maddened her back in the Shack. But she was no longer bound by those rotting walls. She could hunt, she could feast, she could sink her muzzle into warm flesh and—

A blur of black hit her lupine form. Remy flew and landed hard against the unforgiving roots of a nearby tree, scrambling upward to see Padfoot looming over her, hackles up this time and teeth bared white and dangerous in that dark snarl, as if she’d known where Remy’s thoughts had trailed.

Remy snarled back. But she saw the message in every tensed line of the dog’s body. It was not dominance and threat. It was a warning. The sort to keep a friend out of danger

_Don’t listen to those instincts._

Remy remembered for the first time since the moon had risen: She was not meant to hunt the humans. There was some reason—which lay beyond her grasp at the moment—that she must let them alone.

She whined, then flashed her teeth, lest the dog mistake her confusion for a moment of weakness.

Padfoot growled, but her hackles came down. Remy did not run and the dog did not snarl.

Remy realized at this juncture that Wormtail had disappeared. As she looked around for her, an enormous reindeer emerged from the underbrush. The rat clung to its white scruff. It snorted and stamped at Remy, lowering antlers that were small but sharp. This was a warning too, but an unnecessary one. Remy did not leap at the deer as she had at the dog and the rat.

Prongs, Remy realized, her brain slipping around the name and the identity she couldn’t quite attach to it, before settling on one incontrovertible, reassuring truth.

They were all together now.

This was nearly as satisfying as the hunt, and Remy hardly knew why.

The reindeer wheeled into the underbrush, seeming impatient. Padfoot rushed to follow, snapping at Remy’s heels as she went, meaning for her to follow. Remy did. They bounded through the forest in a little mismatched pack. Prongs’ wicked antlers caught in the brush and the branches and Wormtail barely kept her grip on the reindeer’s fur.

Padfoot matched Remy’s pace exactly, lifting her lip in a snarl every time Remy faltered at a tempting smell. The whiff of centaur as they passed through a moonlit grove, or the skittering of too-large spiders through the underbrush. So many things invited Remy’s threat or curiosity. But she kept with the group. _They were together now._

They broke into the fresher, crisper air of the edge of the forest. Prongs clattered to an abrupt halt and Padfoot wheeled round, corralling Remy to stay within the edge of the tree line.

The wind changed, and Remy broke forward, unable to help herself. There were _humans_ in the field, crossing the lawn below the great castle whose spires loomed black against the moonlight.

Remy growled at Padfoot, saliva dripping from her jaw, and darted sideways, meaning to get around the bristling dog. But Prongs darted in, catching her in those surprisingly strong antlers and tossing her bodily into the forest underbrush.

Remy collected herself with a noise between a whine and a snarl, but when she made another bid for the open lawn, it was Padfoot who brought her down with a firm, painful bite to the scruff.

Remy stayed pinned under the dog’s huge weight. As she struggled vainly to free herself, she realized that the others were focused on the humans as well. But they weren’t hunting. They simply watched, with a stillness that suggested whatever was happening was important.

Remy could hardly think around the bloodlust roar in her ears, but she tried to latch onto details.

The humans. There were two of them. A male and a female, both of whom struck familiar shapes, though Remy didn’t know why. Their voices floated incomprehensible across the grass.

The female had stopped halfway down the lawn and stood there silhouetted, her witch’s hat on crooked and her arms folded in her smart robes as the moonlight glinted in her spectacles. She would be an easy mark, if Remy were not pinned to the earth.

All her attention was fixed on the male, who swept toward the front gates in much more grandiose robes, layers upon layers of fabric that would be harder to tear through with teeth. Perhaps a traveling cloak, thick and woolly. He was older, though not slow for it, and wore half-moon spectacles and long gray hair tied back in a ponytail.

Remy growled as he reached the gates, crossed through them, and then turned on the spot, vanishing into thin air and out of her reach.

Curiously, Padfoot whined, and Prongs stamped, and Wormtail squealed. Remy looked around, trying to understand the anxiety that twined through the air strong as animal musk. The other three exchanged glances that seemed to communicate, but Remy could not latch onto what it was.

The witch returned to the castle. Padfoot let Remy up. She almost wanted to follow the wizard’s scent trail, to see if he had truly disappeared, but from the way his scent wavered into nothing on the breeze, she knew it would be pointless.

Wormtail and Padfoot and Prongs were still communicating in some nebulous, refined register that Remy could not follow. She only noticed when the anxiety was drawn back out of the air, packed away for another time.

Wormtail leapt down from Prongs’s scruff and hopped onto Remy’s shoulders, squeaking with frenzy. Padfoot took the lead, yipping at Remy. Whatever had happened with the the humans on the lawn was done with for now. Remy could not hunt what she could not find. Padfoot wanted her to follow the others into the forest, and with all the mysteries folded into its hollows, and these three at her side, it seemed the right thing to do for as long as the moon reigned the sky.

#

Sunrise found Remy on the floor of the master bedroom once more as she shrank back into her human self. The wolf’s muzzle transformed into her ordinary ski-slope nose and pale freckles. The downturned bow of her mouth and her pale blonde hair were lank with dirt and dust from the night outdoors. She had dressed only in her shift for the transformation and the cool autumn air nipped at her bare heels, shocking her back into her own skin.

She groped across the cracked, frigid floorboards under the bed for the warm robe she’d stashed there. Only when she sat up again, having pulled them over her head, did she realize she was not alone as usual.

Saoirse leaned against the bedpost, black hair wild and school clothes rumpled. She did not quite tuck away that same strange expression before Remy met her eyes, the one that looked soft but couldn’t be, since it was on the face of Saoirse Black.

“You’re still here?” Remy jumped up, smoothed at her robes, making sure they covered all the places she knew Saoirse had just gotten a whole eyeful of. “You’ll be seen coming out from the Whomping Willow.”

Saoirse was standing with that studied looseness she adopted whenever she was trying not to look rattled, which was at least half the time these days.

“I wanted to check how much of that you caught wind of last night.”

Remy could hardly remember so much as the last half hour. She knew they’d been in the Forbidden Forest for quite a while. Now that Remy was back to her human self, she remembered that Pip was trying to figure out the tunnel that led into the forest. Whether it opened out in a safe part of the woods, or whether they would need to collapse it for the good of Hogsmeade and their nighttime romps. But she didn’t remember much more than forest floors and a recent dodge of a centaur hunting party.

She shook her head at Saoirse. “Something I ought to know?”

“Dumbledore’s gone away.”

The memory came back to Remy then: the witch and the wizard on the lawn, and the all-encompassing hunger they’d inspired.

“Doesn’t he run errands all the time?” she asked, though a foreboding chill went down her spine. Saoirse would not hang back to tell her that Dumbledore had gone to run errands.

“Prongs eavesdropped,” said Saoirse. “Wormtail and I had to follow you the long way round when you took the forest tunnel. He said something about seeing to political business. It seemed as if McGonagall was trying to talk him out of going in the first place. She told him he was foolhardy for thinking it would be a short trip.”

“Political business,” Remy murmured, sweeping her textbooks out from under the bed. Her mind felt foggy. She always suffered the effects of the sleepless night after she transformed. “Whatever does that mean?”

She had a guess, of course. They were certain Dumbledore had become involved with an anti-You-Know-Who network of some kind, judging by a few cryptic stories run in the Prophet over the past few summers. But she had not been aware of any relation between that network and the government of the wizarding world.

Unless.

Saoirse shifted her weight. Remy’s mind flew back to the letters from the summer. The high-profile visitors to Grimmauld Place, and all their dark secrets.

“There’s nothing going on with the Death Eaters and Ministry of Magic, is there?” Remy asked, alarmed. “They haven’t Imperiused the minister or anything like that?”

Saoirse lifted a shoulder. “You-Know-Who’s got spies all through the place. More every day. I know because Mother’s the one who assigns them. She’s gotten Reggie to help her with the organizing, and Reggie can’t keep her mouth shut around me.”

“But we knew about the spies,” said Remy.

“I know. I don’t think it’s that. The vote for Minister is in a month’s time. Jo’s father’s got campaign stops all through London the next few weeks, and Jo says he’s not ordering the security he should. He thinks it demonstrates fear of the Death Eaters.”

They had discussed this over a game of Wizard Chess last night. “He’s being foolish,” said Remy, as she had before. “It’s right to be afraid of them.”

“I suppose it’s bad politics, though, to look afraid.” Saoirse pushed away from the bedframe and straightened her ruffled robes. “At any rate. We’ve talked it through. We think Dumbledore must be off to help arrange a better security detail for Jo’s father. If he’s elected, with Dumbledore on his side, that’s a lot of power to slow down everything the Death Eaters have started this year. They’ll be trying to Imperius his entire campaign staff.”

Whatever good feelings had remained in Remy from the night of romping were gone.

“The only reason the Death Eaters leave Hogwarts alone is because Dumbledore’s here,” she murmured.

“You don’t have to tell me that.” Saoirse swept to the door. “Maybe he’s hoping they won’t realize he’s gone.”

“Fat chance.”

“I know. Listen, I’ve got to head back before I’m seen. You need me to take any of those books?”

“I got them all here on my own, didn’t I?”

Saoirse snorted. “Only because you’re trying to break your back.” She flicked her wand under the bed and levitated the topmost few, tucking them under her arm. Remy felt ridiculous at the way her heart fluttered.

Stop it, she told herself. It’s just Saoirse being Saoirse. She’s got to cover up how scared she is. She’s not…

She could not quite bring herself to say _flirting,_ even in the privacy of her own mind.

“See you at breakfast,” she told Saoirse, and waited fifteen minutes to start her own cold, dirty trek through the tunnels and back up to the Whomping Willow.

She didn’t know what any of it meant. Dumbledore gone, and Mr. Potter needing more security to protect his staff. Perhaps Saoirse wasn’t so out of line to be acting the way she’d been acting since term started. The Whomping Willow creaked restively overhead as she climbed into the pale dawn. She felt the way the tree sounded. As if she were caught in the beginnings of a gale. As if the world was about to come crashing down about her ears.

She pushed the knot and crept forth into the long grass, her mind clenched miserably around everything Saoirse had just told her. She did not see the figure lurking in the hedgerow on the ridge until it was far too late.

She did not recognize Severus Snape until she locked eyes with him by pure chance.

He took flight across the dewy morning grass the instant she saw him, his stride far too long for Remy to have any hope of catching up. She could only stand there, stricken, as she realized he must have seen her come out from beneath the tree, seen her freeze the malevolent branches.

Worst of all, he had known to look for her here in the first place.

**Author's Note:**

> ***I'll be on hiatus from this Oct 8 and 15 due to some busy personal life stuff, but promise to be back soon!***


End file.
